The Ichthyologist's Library, Installation, 2023

Using the methods of an archive, diary and fiction, I look at the early ideas of exploration, colonialism, museum collection, knowledge, memory, imagination and possibility of a place through a library of and around ichthyology. Through archival references and traces I explore the connection between ichthyology, the branch of zoology that deals with fishes, and establishment of museums, the development of printing and the disappearance of fantastic animals, the relations between zoology and collecting, the early drawings of fishes and the development of knowledge systems, as well as the uneasy relation between memory, knowledge and possibility.

The work ties and unties different stories: from the book in which Austrian ichthyologist Erich Zugmayer recounts one of his expeditions to personal and collective stories about the places he visited, from the 16th century books that marked the conception of modern ichthyology and the first printed illustrations to ideas of occupation and possession, from the early collections of fishes to the notion of truth and the fake. Questioning Zugmayer’s roles of the ‘hunter, hiker, collector, photographer, explorer’ and thinking of the methods of critical fabulation, foraging and rearranging proposed by Saidiya Hartman, arises a new imagination of what an archive could have been.